Vibrations across a Continent: The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act and the Politicization of First Nations Leaders in Saskatchewan

Stevenson, Allyson

American Indian Quarterly, v37 n1-2 p218-236 Win-Spr 2013

The 1983 Review of the Family Services Act (1973) and the Advisory Council meetings in Saskatchewan should be viewed against the backdrop of political changes taking place in North American society. Beginning with decolonization movements in both Canada and the United States, control over the provision of child and family services to indigenous children occupied a central position in discussions of self-determination. Control over child welfare provides a common language to what are essentially competing ideas of kinship and child rearing in indigenous and nonindigenous societies. To explore how activists framed aboriginal child welfare in the early part of the 1980s in Saskatchewan, the author will draw together four historically significant events that privileged certain explanations for aboriginal overrepresentation while silencing others. First, she addresses the 1978 passing of the US Indian Child Welfare Act, which gave tribal courts jurisdiction over the placement of children. Second, she examines the lobbying of the national and Saskatchewan Native women's movement, which sought an end to the gender discrimination in the Indian Act leading to the involuntary loss of Indian status and community membership. Third, there is the movement for self-government among indigenous peoples that resulted in the inclusion of protected rights in the repatriated Constitution of 1982, creating what one scholar has called an "uneasy and undefined relationship with the colonizing state." Finally, she discusses the influence of the local group named the Peyakowak Committee. (Contains 49 notes.)